A Sock in My Pocket

This morning I found a sock in my pocket. It made me smile because it was Boo Boo’s sock. We went out for a little stroll the night before to take advantage of the nice weather and his newfound bipedalism. Just me, Boo Boo and his sock.

Boo Boo loves his socks. He loves taking them off at the dinner table and sampling them over a bowl of spaghetti, a smear of avocado or a heap of scrambled eggs. He loves finding them in his drawers and relocating them around the apartment–under the couch, on his changing table, by his book shelf, and near the fridge where he likes to play with the magnets. Once he gets his hands on a sock they will remain his hostages until they are saturated with saliva or until he discovers that he can’t wear them on his head. He will clutch them when we are dressing him, and it’s been more than once–at restaurants, at parks, at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum–that we’ll take his jacket off and a sock will plop to the ground, having freed itself from his clutches and his sleeves.

It was really important for him to hold his sock as we made our way out of the apartment and down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, where I planted him with his two feet on the ground. The sock was important until the neighbor’s dog came along, and then it was dropped unceremoniously to the gum-speckled sidewalk. In the hierarchy of things that require Boo Boo’s immediate attention dogs are much higher on the totem pole than socks.

I picked up the sock. Some kind of thick high-tech wool sock from his grandpa. Instead of holding the sock, Boo Boo held my hand as he tried to catch the dog’s wagging tail. The dog was a black pit bull. He brought his face close to Boo Boo’s, but he was smart enough not to get too close, lest he get a chunky, graceless hand in his face.

“He loves babies,” said the dog’s owner, herself the mother of a ten-month-old. She and her daughter and the dog live in a brownstone that her mother owns, where she likely grew up. It is a few doors down from us. Since we live in the fourth floor we can see the willow tree in their backyard.

I had seen the woman and the dog countless times when I’m coming home from work. Sometimes she’s just with the dog, sometimes she’s with the dog and her baby strapped to her chest. But now that I’m with Boo Boo we’ve finally had our first conversation and I learn her name. We’ll call her Liz here. Boo Boo and I learned a few other people’s names on our stroll. He made sure to smile at all passers-by and point at all the cats.

“Woof, woof,” he said as he pointed to them.

The first cat we saw was a black and white with large green eyes. It was sitting next to a ceramic pot on a patio.

“It’s a cat. It says meow,” I said. I started meowing at the cat. Boo Boo barked and pointed. The cat sat and stared. 

Boo Boo did a very good job walking. Taking a stroll with a one-year-old is fun because there is no destination to worry about; the journey is the purpose. We walk through the neighborhood, not past the neighborhood. I’ve never paid more attention to the short, ornate wrought-iron fences in front of the brownstones, or the seed pods that the neighborhood trees have dumped on the ground, nor have I been so more aware of how much dog poop is on the sidewalk. 

The highlight of the walk was when Boo Boo saw three cats on the same patio. He stood, gripping the fence, unsure which cat to point at. He was fixated on the cats until a tenant came out of the brownstone with a laundry bag and smiled at him. Boo Boo pointed, stared, and then started following the man. 

That was when I called it a day. I was getting hungry, and I’m sure Boo Boo was too. 

I forgot about the sock until this morning. I usually check my jacket pockets on the way to the subway. If I find receipts or overused tissues I’ll toss them into the trash can at the corner. This time I found a sock.